Networking @Scale 2017 Recap

On May 1-2, we hosted over 600 network engineers at the Pullman Hotel in Redwood City for the third Networking @Scale conference. Similar to last year, the conference included two days of technical talks covering the latest in network engineering, network services, IPv6 applications, and innovations in networking hardware. Speakers from Alibaba, Amazon, Dropbox, Equinix, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix shared complex engineering challenges from their work building and deploying network solutions that deliver applications and services for millions, and sometimes billions, of people around the world.

For a recap of the conference and the presentations, check out the videos below. The @Scale community is focused on bringing people together to openly discuss these challenges and collaborate on the development of new solutions. If you're interested in joining the next event, visit the @Scale website or join the @Scale community.

Moving Fast with Facebook's New Long-Haul Network

Henry Kwok, Facebook

In this talk, Henry introduces Express Backbone, Facebook's new private SD-WAN long-haul network for interconnecting Facebook's data centers. He discusses design aspects such as the automation/modeling software needed to scale out the edge capacity of our network to support our increasing video demands as well as efficient traffic engineering, and lessons learned from the production experience.

Scaling for Exabytes

Jason Wilson, Dropbox

Jason covers the challenges and lessons learned by Dropbox after the company built its own in-house multi-terabit storage system across their data center, backbone, and edge networks.

Automating and Scaling the Edge

Xiaozheng Tie, Facebook

Xiaozheng presents how Facebook adapted Robotron — a unified, scalable system based on a top-down approach — to automate and scale Facebook's new edge network, from design and configuration management, to deployment, verification, and monitoring.

A Close Look at Alibaba's High Performance Packet Processing Platform

Haiyong Wang, Alibaba

Haiyong discusses the highly scalable, high-performance host-based packet processing platform used for load balancing, policy, and DDOS detection at Alibaba. This platform powers all the gateway class services in Alibaba and is essential to the day to day operation of Alibaba’s global business.

Delivering Terabits of Content: External Considerations

Aaron Klink, Netflix

This talk focuses on the the in-country challenges/logistics of scaling Netflix's worldwide caching/presence in support of their global audience and delivery of dozens of Terabits of video traffic to almost 100 million streaming subscribers.

Zero Protocol and TLS 1.3: Low Latency Transport Security at Facebook

Subodh Iyengar, Facebook

Subodh talks about the rationale in moving to TLS 1.3, Facebook's current 1.3 deployment efforts and obstacles uncovered in deploying TLS 1.3 over the internet, as well as secure design abstractions and usage of 0-RTT data in HTTP2.

Facebook CDN: Minimizing Latency and Jitter for Content Delivery

Sumanth Sukumar, Facebook

Sumanth discusses how to provide proactive content delivery across a network, including recent innovations in cache priming for live video and predictive cache priming using machine learning.

The Very Best of Certificate Transparency (2011-Present)

Kat Joyce and Al Cutter, Google

Kat and Al take a whirlwind tour of certificate transparency — the internet technology allowing the detection of mis-issued TLS certificates — and encourage other companies to join the effort.

Internet-scale Virtual Networking using IPv6 ILA

Petr Lapukhov, Facebook

Petr discusses the challenges of building virtual networks, including the use of Internet Logical Addressing (ILA) and IPv6 to achieve better application isolation and flexibility.

Delivering IPv6 on Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

Alan Halachmi, Amazon

Alan covers the process of delivering IPv6 for Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), including how VPC operates and how IPv6 was added to the product, as well as trade-offs and decisions made along the way, such as the creation of the egress-only internet gateway.

Microsoft IT IPv6 Only - The Path Ahead

Todd Thorson, Microsoft

Microsoft IT is working towards an IPv6-only corporate network. Todd provides an overview of the direction and challenges Microsoft IT is facing in adopting IPv6 in Microsoft's large internal network along with the plans to overcome these challenges.

High Altitude Platforms for Rural Backhaul

Adit Sahasrabudhe, Facebook

Adit focuses on Facebook's work to deliver high-speed backhaul connectivity links from High Altitude Platforms (HAPs). This includes efforts to push the state-of-the art in three different link technologies that comprise the network architecture and associated challenges: for example, imagine sitting in Los Angeles and aiming a laser beam to hit the torch of the Statue of Liberty in NYC!

Solving Large Scale Data Center and Cloud Interconnection Problems

Ihab Tarazi, Equinix

This talk describes Equinix’s automation and protocol configurations to enable their colocation facilities, such as transforming data center interconnection and cloud connectivity services using open disaggregated network hardware and software.

How Facebook Designs its Own Hardware and Network

Hans-Juergen Schmidtke and Jimmy Williams, Facebook

Hans-Juergen and Jimmy talk about the demands on the Facebook network, the topology that meets those demands, and the path to building our own hardware and software. This talk covers goals and non-goals of building networks and the hardware that makes it possible.